London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

City Spy: Echo of Gekko lands London bank role

Hot news from Japanese bank Mizuho International, which announces the appointment of Michiel de Jong as its president and chief executive in London.

He has more than 25 years’ experience in global markets and investment banking across multiple geographies including the Netherlands, Singapore, Turkey, Hong Kong and Germany. But has anyone seen this guy and Michael Douglas, who starred as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, on the same trading floor?

When Portillo said hello to ‘horse face’

Michael Portillo, the former Tory minister and now BBC presenting stalwart, was on good form at last night’s British Retail Consortium dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel on Park Lane.

He noted how the evening’s earlier speaker Chukka Umunna, the 33-year-old shadow business secretary, had lavished praise on the Labour Party’s leader Ed Miliband, which Portillo joked showed he was after his boss’s job.

As a former Tory leadership challenger, Portillo should know, of course. He appears better suited to life outside politics, having quit as an MP in 2005.

Portillo amused the retail crowd by admitting one of his biggest gaffes as an MP came when he inadvertently referred to a constituent as “horse face” when he sent her a signed copy of his photo.

Putting a sale sign on the Ritz?

REMEMBER where you read it first: Rumours are flying around the City that the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly is being offered for sale in strict secrecy. Last October, its owners, the Barclay brothers, highlighted in their annual results that they had received several unsolicited takeover offers for the iconic hotel, which they declared to be worth at least £625 million. The Barclays’ spinners, Brunswick, denies talk of a Ritz sale when City Spy calls, but it seems they’ve taken several other calls on that very subject...

* A portentous announcement pings into the in-box. The National Statistician is launching a consultation on potential options for improving the Retail Prices Index. City Spy’s submission is: make it lower.

Ping! And there’s another one: “With only 96 days left until Christmas, it’s time to start planning and budgeting for the festive season!” says the irritatingly bright and breezy PR at Pilotmax. No, it’s not. Go away.

* More than a quarter of UK journalists are unable to work without social media, according to public relations outfit Cision and Canterbury Christ Church University. The most popular social media among UK journalists is Twitter, with 80% favouring it — a statistic that presumably applies even more so to City PRs, since many of these flaks seem to spend their lives “following” hacks online. However, only 39% of respondents said that social media has improved their productivity. Does that mean the productivity of the other 61% has fallen?